RFC Media creates content-driven Internet radio stations that help brands and events engage deeply with their target audiences. Building and bolstering listener relationships in a way not possible with branded playlists, RFC Media’s stations are hand-crafted and hosted live by award-winning, on-air personalities. In addition to creating branded online radio for organizations such as NASA and retail chains including Specs Liquor and Timewise Food Stores, RFC Media also powers dozens of original stations and live, on-location event broadcasts for leading Internet radio portal TuneIn, complementing the latter’s massive array of aggregated stations with custom-format, themed programming.

Plagued by frequent technical problems with their previous streaming provider, RFC Media turned to StreamGuys to give them the rock-solid reliability they needed. “Our old provider’s service would go down quite often, and they were unable to figure out what was causing the outages,” said John Whiteside, technical director at RFC Media. “As a services company ourselves, we can’t afford to have such issues affecting our clients, as our reputation is on the line – particularly with top-tier clients like TuneIn who require flawless performance for their listeners. We’ve never had problems like that since switching to StreamGuys. From myself to our President and our COO, we all sleep better at night.”

While reliability was RFC Media’s primary goal, the StreamGuys platform has also delivered audible advantages. “We get much higher audio quality,” Whiteside enthused. “Our old platform required a proprietary encoder, which degraded the audio. The second we turned on a StreamGuys stream at the same bit rate, we could hear a huge difference.”

The depth and flexibility of StreamGuys’ platform were also keys to RFC Media’s selection. “We run 96 stations and counting, and some of our customers have very specific requirements that may only apply to one station,” Whiteside explained. “Being able to meet the individual needs of each of our clients was essential. We found the StreamGuys platform to be the easiest to work with and very customizable, with lots of tools we can use to meet our varying needs and ensure that we have the best-quality product going out. StreamGuys offers a whole lot more for your money than a lot of the competition out there.”

Although the brand-specific nature of their clients’ stations typically precludes outside advertising, RFC Media takes advantage of StreamGuys’ third-party, dynamic ad insertion capabilities for those customers who wish to monetize their streams with additional revenue sources. “While most of our stations don't use any external ads, StreamGuys' advertising integration features make it easy for us to incorporate third-party commercials for those clients who do want them," Whiteside shared.

RFC Media takes advantage of numerous offerings in StreamGuys’ SGsuite of SaaS tools, with the SGalerts service monitoring software a particular highlight for Whiteside. “It alerts me promptly of any issues affecting any of our stations, so I can quickly resolve them,” he said. “That helps us meet our guaranteed uptime commitment for our clients.”

RFC Media uses StreamGuys’ feature-rich, HTML5 SGplayer multimedia player on select client sites to deliver high-quality streaming experiences across any device, and the SGreports log processing service to report detailed listener metrics to their clients and their sales team. Their most recent addition, SGmetadata software, leverages StreamGuys’ efficient, push-based approach to dramatically reduce the bandwidth usage – and thus cost – of delivering metadata such as song, album and artist information to listeners.

RFC Media’s satisfaction with StreamGuys also extends beyond the platform itself to the company and its people. “StreamGuys has been absolutely fantastic to work with,” Whiteside said. “Their customer service is number one, and it’s been a great relationship. Out of all of the streaming platforms and providers that we’ve dealt with, StreamGuys is the best.”